In the 1930s, cultural theorist Walter Benjamin wrote Krisis des Romans, or, Crisis of the Novel. Forty years later, Tom Wolfe saw the novel being replaced by New Journalism. Most recently, Andrew Marr wrote of the novel’s potential demise in the May edition of The Observer.

Like a cat, it seems the novel has many lives. 

Lately, though, the talk’s shifted from the novel-as-form to the book itself. After all, who needs to lug around a thick hardback when you can upload its contents onto your handy dandy cell phone?

That’s the impetus behind a product called Sound Novels in Japan, a scrolling text novel you upload to your techno-device du jour. It’s no wonder bibliophiles have trouble sleeping at night.

And who, for that matter, hasn’t noticed the influx of contractions and computer jargon, the LOLs and the emoticons? Of course, the English language has always been in flux, no more stable than a great bowl of gelatine, each inch disparate in taste and shifting in color. Still, there’s good reason to be concerned. In her hilarious book-length protest against the degradation of the English language, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Lynne Truss is being more than tongue-in-cheek when she asks,

“What the semicolon’s anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?” (122)

Truss might be glad to know that, in the midst of the growing linguistic habdashery she sees haunting Western culture, things aren’t necessarily dire. Yet.  

Truss asks, Just how sacred are words?

Image via Wikipedia

In his blog, award-winning novelist Neil Gaiman describes an experiment. For a limited time he offered one of his novels, American Gods for free as a downloadable pdf.  Career-suicide? Hardly. 

Sales for American Gods skyrocketed. Not the e-book version, however. The hardcopy. According to Gaiman,

“Given that Harper Collins sold a lot more of all my books while the free American Gods was out there, with sales of all my titles up 40% through independent bookshops, I think I can safely say that we’ll be doing it — or rather, something similar — again.” 

Remember the first book that made you cry? I do. John Irving’s The World According to Garp. I was too young to understand it fully, but the tragic-comic ending brought me to tears. Or maybe you remember a story that made you bust a gut. Easy. Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar. Even as a little tyke I saw the world as patently absurd, and nothing bore out that absurdity like the antics of the children at Wayside. 

Maybe your memories involve other people. Maybe you remember the way your grandfather’s creased hands and the paper of the book he read to you before bed seemed to blend, or the echo of Robert Munch’s “I love you for always” that returns like a boomerang whenever you stare into the eyes of your own children.

Few are those who fantasize about curling up on the beach, palm pilot in hand, reading the latest John Grisham novel in increments so bite-sized you need a magnifying glass to distinguish between an end stop and a comma. 

The almost aphrodisiacal qualities of new car smell are well documented, but there’s something to be said about new book smell (or if you count used bookstores amongst your favourite haunts, the musty smell of well worn pages). 

We’re in a world of jarring progress, a megalithic nexus of fast cars, fast bodies, loud noises and bright lights. Close your eyes and try to stop your head from spinning. You might as well be chasing the Dodo bird off the Indian Ocean. 

If the Industrial Revolution instilled in us a taste for technology, our time and place has done the opposite. What was once a green paradise is now a parking lot. 

The book, then, is a refuge, a revolt. A place of escape. People read precisely because it’s earthy, challenging, a return to days of yore. It’s quiet and comfort.

Visual stimulus might get more press, but if Gaiman’s experiment is any indication, the printed word still has some fight left in it. In a rare case of technological advance losing ground to the antiquities from the good old days, the book, in all its magnificent, weighty glory, survives.